Branching Brownian motion with an inhomogeneous breeding potential

This article concerns branching Brownian motion (BBM) with dyadic branching at rate beta vertical bar y vertical bar(p) for a particle with spatial position y is an element of R, where beta > 0. It is known that for p > 2 the number of particles blows up almost surely in finite time, while for p = 2 the expected number of particles alive blows up in finite time, although the number of particles alive remains finite almost surely, for all time. We define the right-most particle, R(t), to be the supremum of the spatial positions of the particles alive at time t and study the asymptotics of R(t) as t -> infinity. In the case of constant breeding at rate beta the linear asymptotic for R(t) is long established. Here, we find asymptotic results for R(t) in the case p is an element of (0, 2]. In contrast to the linear asymptotic in standard BBM we find polynomial asymptotics of arbitrarily high order as p up arrow 2, and a non-trivial limit for In R(t) when p = 2. Our proofs rest on the analysis of certain additive martingales, and related spine changes of measure.